"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Wednesday, February 01, 2017

African-American History Month and (Urban and Transportation) Planning

February is Black History Month and it's a good opportunity for the planning profession to focus attention on African-American issues and cultural history in terms of land use planning, transportation planning and transit, and parks planning (among other disciplines).

White privilege/structural racism. There was a good op-ed piece in the Washington Post on white privilege ("This is what white privilege is"). I hate to admit that it took a long time for me to reboot my own way of thinking about this.A Freedom Riders bus went up in flames when a fire bomb was tossed through a window near Anniston, Ala. Ambulance drivers refused to take injured black riders to area hospitals.﻿ AP file photograph.

Recently, there have been some good articles about the reality of structural racism, which many people choose to not see.

After graduating from high school, she attended the University of Michigan but, because black students were not allowed to live on campus there at the time, soon transferred to historically black Talladega College in Alabama.

I never knew.

If they even notice it, too many people take that kind of structural racism for granted, as a kind of natural law, and these days, because that happened "so long ago," as not a problem relevant to today.

Policing, crime, criminal justice, and public safety. One element of urban planning is public safety and policing, although usually the traditional "Office of Planning" doesn't interact all that much with a police department, even though typically police departments have research units and they may have planners on staff.Obviously, with the #BlackLivesMatter movement calling attention to the reality of police officer killings of civilians, while I have been writing about this issue for some time, how this issue is being addressed is changing.

(Note with regard to the latter, during my student protest days in college, I used to say we shouldn't bother taking over the Administration building, which is more about visibility, but taking over the parking garage across the street, where their cars were parked, and the university's two computing centers.)Transit. The history of the Civil Rights Movement is intimately linked to transportation access, segregation on transit and in transit stations, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Riders, etc. PBS had programs on the Freedom Riders a few years ago. It'd be nice for them to do repeat showings (although at least some PBS stations did run a number of such programs on Martin Luther King Day).

It focuses on the "Freedom Riders," the people who pushed the federal government to enforce public accommodations laws concerning inter-state transportation. It highlights Tampa Bay residents who participated and the book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, by Raymond Arsenault, a professor at University of South Florida.

But I think transit authorities ought to compile local histories of transportation and transit including race, public accommodations, environmental justice and other considerations.

For example in DC, transit wasn't segregated (although restaurants and other public facilities were at the time). But the transit company did discriminate in terms of hiring.

And there may have been issues with inter-state transit, although back then most surface transit services were offered on an intra-city or intra-county basis and didn't cross state lines. This kind of history should be codified, interpreted and presented, during Black History Month and throughout the year.

I can't imagine that transit in the Tampa area was free of discrimination before say 1965, and if so, that history needs to be acknowledged and communicated as much as the "Freedom Riders."

Transportation history and the automobile. Because restaurants and hotels were segregated, automobile travel could be problematic for African-Americans too. The "The Negro Motorist Green-Book" was a guide for African-American travelers, providing directions to those places which would accommodate them in otherwise segregated communities ("An atlas of self-reliance: The Negro Motorist's Green Book (1937-1964)," Smithsonian Museum of American History).

Transportation Technology. An African-American, Garrett Morgan of Cleveland created the three-position traffic signal, adding the middle phase "yellow," to what had been two-stage stop and go signals. COMTO chapters sponsor "Garrett Morgan Days" as a kind of career planning event and introduction to the transportation field.

Granville Woods invented the device that allowed for the transmission of electricity from catenary to the streetcar through a pole and wheel roller.

Biking. Major Taylor was an African-American cycling racer active in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Today's Major Taylor Clubs (Seattle)promote cycling in African-American communities.

Land Use. Segregation and racism marks many US center cities. Segregation through zoning was introduced in Baltimore in the early 1900s and spread very quickly to other places. Race-based deed restrictions were another way to restrict African-American access to neighborhoods. So were race-based underwriting standards in the federal mortgage guarantee program--restrictions that were not lifted until the late 1960s.Urban renewal. The Urban Renewal redevelopment movement starting in the 1950s frequently targeted African-American and other minority neighborhoods for change, with the residents left on their own for relocation. DC's Southwest quadrant was one of the pilot locations for testing the program.

I recently came across a fascinating presentation, called the Bulldozer and the Rose, with before and after photos in Southwest DC, by someone contemporary with the process.

Housing and gentrification. A complicated issue that I have covered many times.

Community Economic Development and Poverty Interdiction. This is a topic on which I plan to write a position paper on at some point. In the meantime, Charlotte-Mecklenberg, Dallas, and Richmond have interesting initiatives that bear further inspection.

Parks and recreation. Historically, parks, recreation facilities and public spaces were also segregated. Many communities had separate facilities, public and private (such as amusement parks, clubs, etc.) for blacks and whites. That changed with the Civil Rights laws.

Theresa Brown, now deceased, was a leader in DC's historic preservation movement and led the effort to create the Le Droit Park Historic District. Washington Post photo.

Historic preservation. The National Park Service is also home to the federal government's historic preservation program. The cultural resource management program of the organization has extensive programs focused on preserving African-American heritage.

Of course, just as urban renewal was called "Negro removal," historic preservation is criticized as a method of reproducing and repositioning space in a manner which displaces low income residents.

Many African-American neighborhoods have been historically designated across the country. Sweet Auburn comes to mind in Atlanta, Sugar Hill in Harlem, U Street in DC, and the Eatonville Historic District, where Zora Neale Hurston grew up, in Florida come to mind off the top of my head.History and cultural interpretation/Civil rights history. Last year the Associated Press reported ("Some civil rights sites at risk of being lost to history) on how there isn't a systematic program on a national scale to preserve places significant to the nation's history of civil rights.

I have suggested that this should be done for African-American history more generally, and could be done for civil rights history as part of that. Ideally, a national organization like the new Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture could take the lead on such an initiative.History and cultural interpretation/Memorials and Monuments of the Confederate Cause. There has been a lot of discussion about monuments and memorials to people who were ardent segregationists. Monuments to segregationists have been defaced in many places across the country as a protest. Many institutions are changing their policies and practices as a result of this renewed discussion.

For example, South Carolina has stopped flying the Confederate flag--a symbol of opposition to civil rights--at the State Capitol and in other public places. The University of Maryland has renamed its football stadium ("Maryland Got Rid of a Racist Name… Is It Really That Hard, Pigskins?," Unobstructed View column, Washington City Paper).

Officials in Slocum, Texas unveil a marker that offers a brief account of the Slocum Massacre. (Dylan Hollingsworth/For The Washington Post).

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About Me

I am an urban/commercial district revitalization and transportation/mobility advocate and consultant and a principal in BicyclePASS, a bicycle facilities systems integration firm, based in Washington, DC. Urban economic competitiveness is dependent on efficient transit and mixed use, compact places. Therefore, I end up writing mostly about mobility and urban design. While I am based in and write about Washington, DC issues, I try to write so that "universal lessons" are evident in the entries.